Or how to meet Chinese girls with these apps ☺

Love is always a good market, as we can see with the rise of dating applications in the world and even in China. Three of them are the most famous in Middle Kingdom: Jiayuan, Momo and Tantan. A fourth one can also be added to the list: WeChat. This latter is not a dating app but is used like one by a lot of Chinese people.

Jiayuan, rise and fall

First was Jiayuan in 2003, offering online dating services in China, then abroad with the dating website Match.com. It was then launched in 2011 on Nasdaq stock market with $11 per stock, and at that time Jiayuan was China’s leading site for matchmaking and dating.

This success was not very long: since this launching year, Jiayuan is not leading the dating market anymore and is mostly falling…

Why this downward?

The emergence of smartphones

This drop can be explained by the incapacity for Jiayuan to anticipate the emergence of smartphones. The company simply did not manage to adapt itself to the mobile market in which it operates. With more than half Chinese people using internet daily (25 hours per week on average) on their mobile, and the fall of PC, using mobile apps for marketing campaign and e-commerce seems to be the only way for a brand to survive.

Moreover, Jiayuan did not succeed to monetize its services and devices in a smart way.

As a replacement, two apps specialized in dating services were born, Momo and Tantan. And another one… WeChat, whose primary function is instant messaging.

Momo:180 million of users

Launched in 2011, Momo is a free location-based instant messaging app for smartphones which allows users to expand their social relationships by chatting with nearby friends and strangers, based on similar locations and interests.

Tantan : 16,5 million of users

Tantan is a new dating service, similar to Tinder. Users can start a conversation only if two persons like each other’s pictures. Tantan system is simple, you have just to swipe people’s profile on the left if you do not like their picture, moving on to the next person’s profile or to swipe it on the right if you like it. And it also works by GPS localization.

WeChat: 640 Millions of internet users

WeChat is maybe one of the biggest mobile application which was hijacked by users. WeChat was launched in 2011 by Tencent, a giant Chinese company which also leads Sina Weibo, a social network similar to Twitter.

WeChat is a multi-function mobile app and was originally just for instant messaging. WeChat is now a multi-tasking tool, especially with a “shake” feature which allows you to be found and contacted by anyone close enough.

But it seems this dating landscape is changing with the rise of a new state of mind, which is more close to long relationship with wedding plan than just a short relationship or simply a night date. Behaviors are changing, and we can bet that social media and dating applications will succeed this new challenge in the future.

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